Does Accepting you will Die Make you Happy?

	Book review on Human Immortality: Death and Adjustment Hypotheses Elaborated by Mohammad Samir Hossain Reviewed by Peter Fenwick, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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This is an interesting book and argues that the great paradox of Freud concerning death has wide and fundamental effects on our psychic life.  Freud pointed out that whenever we talk about death, we always talk about someone else's, and never our own. This is because it is difficult for us to contemplate our own death and we naturally turn away from it with a strong impulse of inner fear. Dr. Hossain, an assistant professor of   psychiatry in Dhaka, Bangladesh,  has set out to investigate this paradox.

Dr. Hossain studied five groups of people (30 in each) who he measured for their religious observation.  The most intensely religious were those Muslim preachers who say their prayers regularly. Next non-preachers who regularly say their prayers five times a day.  Then those who say their prayers five times a day but not regularly.  Next those who say their prayers between one and five times a day.  The final group is a catch-all for those who do not pray many times a day and have little or no faith in religion.  These groups were given a rather uncomfortable measure derived from DSM4 and listing a large number of symptoms.  They were then asked to tick if they had any of these symptoms.   Because they are taken from DSM4 they go widely across many of the neurotic categories, and none of the diagnoses featuring psychoses were used.  He calls this a 'neurotic symptoms score'.  The final scoring instrument was a death rejection score check list constructed by the author, based on the work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross and the stages she gave of death and dying. 

What the author showed was that those who believe in an after-life have the lowest neurotic symptoms score and the lowest death rejection score.  Or, put the other way round, failure to believe in an after-life is correlated with a high neurotic symptom score.    He argues that belief in an after-life is protective against neurotic illness, and he goes on to analyse this in the book. 

His analysis suggests that fear of death is essentially destructive and impacts on many areas of personal function but is mitigated by acceptance of an after-life.   His view is not too different from those studies which have already shown that religious practice is protective against mental illness.  In 2000 the Templeton Foundation brought out a book by Harold Koenig and co-authors called 'The Handbook of Religion and Health,' which points strongly to the fact that people who hold strong religious beliefs and carry out religious practices tend to be healthier and live longer.  This also now is in agreement with many of the recent studies on mindfulness meditation and the study of religious groups in close institutions which point to the same conclusions. 

An important question remains.  Is it the rejection of an after-life and the consequent psychological conflict which ensues that leads to higher rates of mental illness, or is it possibly the associated factors which may go with a religious life such as reduced drug and alcohol consumption, a tighter social group and more community support, which produces the beneficial effects of religious belief and practice?  The author is clear in his book that it is the former. Could it be, asks the author, that this is also a major drive towards religious belief.

Unfortunately, the author has been let down by his publishers who should have copy-edited his manuscript much more carefully, as the English is at times not always clear and sometimes leads to ambiguity.  But overall this is an interesting book because it has grasped Freud's paradox firmly and shown that it may not only have implications for a Western culture, but be a universal human fear.

Dr. Peter Fenwick is President of the Network.

(order this book from amazon.co.uk)